Columnists at Sports on Earth tackle the four leading championship contenders in "Four Teams, One Dream." / Sports on Earth

by Paul Myerberg, USA TODAY Sports

by Paul Myerberg, USA TODAY Sports

Instead of arguing over which team deserves to top the polls or which two teams deserve to meet for the national championship in January, four columnists at Sports on Earth, a joint venture between the USA TODAY Sports Media Group and MLB Advanced Media, discussed just what makes each team â?? and each program â?? so special. Sports on Earth calls it "Four Teams, One Dream." Here are a few quotes from each story.

"Kansas State is completely, utterly and entirely self-made. It is a program with no advantages. Kansas is much too small a state to sustain the football recruiting of one major Division I program, and the state has two of them. The television market is tiny. There's no easy way to get to Manhattan, Kan., and no particular reason why you would just end up there. When Bill Snyder took over, the school was widely acknowledged as the worst in Division I college football, and had been for a half century. But, even more telling, that's EXACTLY what you would have expected it to be."

Dave Kindred on Notre Dame: "I love the idea of Notre Dame as the standard of excellence."

"The trick in praising Notre Dame is to do it without suggesting, as some Irish zealots do, that God has an interest in the outcome of the university's games. Even [Knute] Rockne said, 'I've found that prayers work best when you have big players.' So I'll leave God out of this, except to repeat a story told by Notre Dame's 1953 Heisman Trophy winner, Johnny Lattner. He had fumbled five times in a game. Afterward, coach Frank Leahy handed Lattner a football. 'Go to the chapel," Leahy said, "and repent for those five mortal sins you committed on Saturday.'"

Chuck Culpepper draws Oregon. He writes of the Ducks' win over USC on Saturday, "It looked like spaceship football. It looked like most everything else looks antique. It looked like the rest of you are too busy huddling."

"For decades, fanatics have dialed radio stations howling with their worries while wishing the head coach and the offensive coordinator would suddenly lapse into some streak of boldness. All that yelping, all those shows, all those years of yearning and slobbering and caterwauling, all of that has merged into one 21st-century cure known as Oregon. It wins. It thrills. It does what fans always wanted coaches to do. It reels off points that read like a fan's good dream: 57, 42, 63, 49, 51, 52, 43, 70, 62. It lends tranquil fourth quarters full of steady pulses and glimpses of backups."

Tommy Tomlinson writes of Alabama, "Most Alabamians can modulate their passion, but every so often somebody breaks off the knob."

"Alabama wins under Saban the same way it won under The Bear: The defense wears you down, and the running game plows you under. (I believe it was Auburn historian Wayne Flynt who put forth a theory about why the state's teams are so stout on defense: Alabama has always been good at resisting progress.) All over the country, other teams are running spreads and Air Raids and no-huddles and other stuff that led Saban to say, 'Is this what we want football to be?' Alabama's schemes aren't as simple now as when The Bear ran the wishbone. But they're not complicated. They're just executed by five-star players with five-star coaching. Alabama rose up on the backs of farmers, and mill workers, and people pulling the graveyard shift at the factory. They are people who admire simple hard work done well. Even if Saban gets more than $5 million a year for doing it."

All four columns are worth checking out. There's something special about these four teams. There's also something very special about each program.